Volume 32, Number 17 · November 7, 1985
Looking for Poetry in America
By Helen Vendler
Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
by Robert Hass
Ecco, 308 pp., $17.95
Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry
by Dave Smith
University of Illinois Press, 256 pp., $19.95
American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980
by Robert von Hallberg
Harvard University Press, 276 pp., $22.50
What is there to say about a poem? about poetry? about a national poetry? about a poetry and the culture from which it issues? These questions animate the three books under review, which perhaps answer, rather than face, the hard questions that must underlie any critical remarks. We have no well-developed literary theory of lyric poetry, chiefly because Aristotle codified his poetics in the light of epic and dramatic poetry. The hard questions might be said to be: Is there anything at all useful that can be said about a lyric poem? If so, in what terms? Are the terms determined by the poem, by its own culture, by our culture, or by transcultural philosophic universals? Can a poem be taken as a sign of its culture and, if so, how? How does a critic or a culture arrive at canonical preferences? Is the poem as linguistic sign different from the poem as cultural token, and if so, how? Can the word 'poetry' as a collective noun have any intelligible meaning? Is the meaning confined within a national and historical border (allowing one to speak intelligibly of 'English poetry' or 'Greek poetry,' but not of 'poetry')? Is 'poetry' mimetic, a representation of an external world? If so, is it mimetic through its images, or through its internal structures, or in some other way? Is all poetry necessarily narrative, even the briefest Iyric?
Review, 7903 words
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